That Missing Year
by pinkskyline
Summary: What went down before Sam hit the dog. Possibly not season 8 compliant. Original character/outsider/hunter perspective.
1. Chapter 1

So I wrote the first three chapters of this story last summer before season 8 started. I might be able to mush it into canon, somehow, but at the moment it is AU. Outsider hunter perspective on the brothers.

I met Sam in a small town in the middle of Omaha.

He approached me and started talking ghosts right off. He seemed to have the sixth sense that most hunters have that allow us to recognize each other, or maybe it was just the fact that we'd both been haunting the microfiche section of the library looking through decades of homicides in the local newspaper for the past three days. I hadn't noticed him. Sloppy, I know, and hard to believe if you've ever seen the guy.

Inconspicuous he is not. Sam's tall and all around big—the kind of guy than can make most girls, even hunters like me, feel small and delicate.

Not that I'm into feeling small and delicate.

Not that I'm into Sam.

But he is interesting. Mysterious. And there was something plaintive about him that first day, like he was sick to death of working alone. When he suggested we go out together to the old Walker place to look for the ghost, I agreed.

It's good to have someone to watch your back. I hadn't had a partner since my uncle died. Most hunters are more trouble than they're worth, especially for a woman who is reasonably attractive, which I've been told I am. They're used to loving them and leaving them, and having a female partner is a bit like having a wife for most of them. Not what they're looking for. As for female hunters, well, I hadn't met a female hunter in a long time. I don't much get along with women, anyway.

Hunters don't necessarily tread the straight and narrow path, either, and it's hard to know what kind of hunter you're going to meet. Some hunters take a lot of liberties with the law—'cause they figure they deserve to, seeing as how they're fighting evil and all. I'm not above a hustle now and again myself, but some hunters think they can take whatever they want from the regular people…and that isn't right, no matter how tempting it might be.

And despite his size, Sam didn't seem like any kind of threat. He had an almost childlike sweetness…sensitivity…maybe it was lack of confidence—that changed of course, but I'll get to all that. Point is he seemed like he would be a genuine threat to the things that go bump in the night and leave me the hell alone, so I went along.

Funny, he didn't work like a guy who'd always had a partner. He fought like he was used to having someone watch his back, but he seemed to want to do all the research and leg work himself. Maybe he just didn't trust me to do the job right, after all, he and his whole family are pretty legendary, not that I knew who he was back then. Maybe he'd butted heads just as much with Dean as he did with me. At the time I attributed his tendency to be a control freak to his being a lone wolf, and I thought he'd get over it after a few weeks. He didn't, really, but I stood up for myself and he started to depend on me.

After that first hunt we started to travel together. I sold my car for scrap and Sam told me about the Leviathan.

It was all a bit hard to swallow, but it did explain a lot.

He didn't tell me then how the Leviathan came to escape from Purgatory, or that they'd been so organized. He certainly never said anything about using the word of god to make a weapon to kill their king. I kid you not. _That_ god. The one from Sunday school.

Anyway, all he told me at the time was that the chompers existed and how we could kill them.

We met Jason in Pennsylvania, and he helped us out with a Siren situation. Sam told him about Rufus's cabin—well, he had to, because Jason had a broken leg and he needed a place to get better. Turned out the leg didn't heal right and Jason ended up with a bad limp—his hunting days were over. Sam felt responsible I guess, or sorry for him. Anyway, things worked a lot better with Jason manning the phones. Sam had this whole system figured out where every phone had a separate identity, and we could call the number for the person we wanted to run the con. Jason played the part of the FBI, CDC or whatever without having to be told who the other person on the line expected to talk to.

It was genius.

Brad and Cody showed up next, on the run from the law, then the General and then Mikey. There were other hunters who came and went, but we were the core. Every one of us was happy to have a place to sometimes call home, and for a little while it was almost like we were family.

Things started to get weird when this guy called Crowley showed up. Sam said he was a demon.

It's not like hunters don't know that demons exist, it's just that demons, even the run of the mill ones, are so far above pay grade for most hunters that we don't spend a lot of time in their company—demons are things that hunters run from. I'd never met a hunter who seemed to have a long standing association—maybe even friendship, judging from the things Crowley said—with a demon.

Sam stood his ground but he seemed scared…respectful. In fact, Crowley even complimented him on how respectful he was being.

"I like you, Sam. You know your place. However, our encounters just don't have the same punch they did when Dean was around. Nothing like trading insults to keep conversation lively," he said.

"What do you want, Crowley?" Sam asked.

"What do you think I want?" Crowley asked.

Sam sighed with impatience. "I don't want to play games, Crowley. You took Kevin, Dean and Cas are gone…I can't imagine what you want. I don't have anything that hasn't already been taken from me."

"I don't know Sam. Some might say you have a lot _more_ now than you did before. It seems like you've got a brand new clubhouse and, what, followers? Is this some kind of a cult? Don't drink the Koolaid, kids," he said.

"What. Do. You. Want?" Sam asked slowly.

Crowley scowled. "You're no fun at all. I never noticed how much more fun Dean was than you, and not just because he's a damn sight prettier than you are, Moose. He makes a demon feel truly hated. You just make me bored."

Sam raised his hands in exasperation. "Well, don't let me keep you."

"Fine," Crowley said like he making a huge concession. "I want more of the tablets."

"I don't know how the Leviathan found the first one. And if I did find them, I'd never give them to you," Sam said.

"I'll kill the prophet," Crowley said.

"If you kill the prophet, you won't be able to read the tablets," Sam said.

"I kill a prophet, God makes a new one."

"If you kill a prophet Archangels will obliterate you even if you are in hell," Sam said.

"If there were any Archangels around to protect poor little Kevin Tran I wouldn't have him in the first place," Crowley said.

"You won't kill Kevin. Why kill a prophet when there's no guarantee the next time you get near one you won't get smote to kingdom come?"

"I'll kill Meg," Crowley said.

"Be my guest," Sam said, shrugging.

Crowley looked like he was starting to enjoy the negotiations. He smiled slightly. "I'll fetch your precious brother Dean for you, then."

Sam paused, showed his hand, really, although I guess Crowley knew all along that Dean was that important to Sam. None of us had ever even heard of the guy. "Where is he?" Sam asked.

"He got sucked into Purgatory when he killed Dick Roman. He's probably dead by now. But if he's alive—he's in Purgatory, and I can get him out."

"I don't believe you can. If you could open the door to Purgatory you would have already done it, and not to save my brother."

"Who said anything about opening a door? There are other ways," Crowley said.

"What ways? What about Cas?" Sam asked.

"Not on your life, Moose. I'll only deal for Dean. The angel's on his own," Crowley said.

Sam paused again, looking tempted. "I've done some shitty things in my life, Crowley, but I'm not going to find the word of god so I can hand it off to the king of hell. Not even for Dean."

"Come on Sam, what's the man in the sky done for you lately? He let Cas go power crazy and declare himself god. Bobby took a bullet. Dean saved humanity yet again and all it got him was a one way ticket to Monsterland. God's simply not on your side, anymore," Crowley said.

"Crowley, it's not about choosing sides. It's about what you'll do when you get even more power," Sam said.

Crowley scowled. "Dean would have made that deal."

Sam raised his chin stubbornly. "I don't think so."

"No matter. I'll find them myself," Crowley said, disappearing abruptly.

"What in hell was that all about?" I asked.

Sam ignored the question. He was thinking hard about something, and I gave him a moment. Mikey, the only other person who'd been witness to the exchange, was not so patient.

"Was that the goddamned devil? Was the goddamned devil just in our house?" he said, his voice edging into panic in a way I hadn't even imagined possible for the muscle-head.

"He's not the devil, he's the king of hell," Sam said absently, obviously still thinking about Crowley.

"What's going on, boss?" I asked.

"We have to find those tablets. If Crowley wants them, there's got to be something he can use on them. Something bad. We need to keep him from getting his hands on them," Sam said.

And that's when I started my illustrious career as an amateur archeologist, looking for tablets containing the word of God.

I guess if my mother hadn't been murdered by a vampire when I was two, she'd have been proud.


	2. Chapter 2

If I'd been smart I would have walked out that door.

It's not like I even believed anything they were saying. It all sounded like jibber-jabber to me. More than anything else it made me suspicious of Sam, who—with his apparent long-standing association with the king of hell—suddenly seemed a lot less harmless then he had at first.

It was easier to think of him as being crazy or something. It might sound funny, the fact that I believed that the demon was the king of hell, but I didn't believe anything he was saying about angels and god and all that.

Well, demons have been known to lie.

And when you'd been practically born a hunter like me, it was a lot easier to believe there were bad things in the basement than good things watching over us upstairs. If there was a god, where was he when my mother died? Where was he when I had to drop out of school at thirteen? Where was he when choices I made on a hunt got my father killed? When my uncle had to make the choice to jump in front of a blade aimed at my heart?

So I ignored all the crap about angels because I didn't want to hear it. I chose to think of it as Crowley running a scam on Sam and Sam being too bone deep dumb to realize it.

So why the hell didn't I leave Sam to this tablet business and go on my merry way? Well, I guess when it comes down to it there was a reason we were all together: Sam, Jason, Brad, Cody, Mike, the General, and me. It was because sometimes the loneliness gets to be too much. Sometimes the road and the mind-numbing weariness of doing a job that no one appreciates, because you're driven, because you want revenge, just gets to be too much.

We all want a place to call home, no matter how hard we pretend to be. And even though most of us thought Sam was batshit crazy when he started this crusade to rescue the tablets from the confines of the earth or whatever, we had to accept his craziness if we wanted to stay a family.

In a way, even though he was the youngest, Sam was sort of the one who brought us together. He was the central figure of our mythology. We couldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, even if the bathwater in question happened to involve a bunch of crazy crap we couldn't care less about. It mattered to Sam, so it mattered to us.

The only people, if you could call them that, who had successfully found a tablet, were the Leviathan, or so Sam said. He wanted us to break into Sucracorp to find out how they'd found it.

I don't know what he wanted us to do—break in and search the browser history on their computers or something, I guess—but we wouldn't let him do it. Even though the Leviathan had lost their leader, there was still a Dick Roman in charge of all that and he still had a bunch of his cronies in all the businesses that mattered. The conspiracy wasn't growing, like it had been with the original Dick, but we hadn't torn the structure of what Dick had built to shreds yet. It was an unnecessary risk.

I told Sam I had a contact that could help us.

I knew a university professor from Iowa. He'd helped me out on a hunt, and then I'd been able to help him out with a problem of the supernatural persuasion myself. He was an expert on biblical lore—not the bible itself, but all the other texts about god that were written around the same time. The Apocrypha, the Dead Sea scrolls, shit like that.

So we went to see Professor Clarke. Sam was seemed surprisingly adept at getting around a university. I thought maybe he'd sought out lots of advice from experts on hunts, but when Dean came back he called Sam college boy enough times we all figured out Sam hadn't always been like us.

Back in the day he'd been somebody.

We found Clarke in the pub surrounded by his notes. He greeted me warmly; I'd let him know I was coming and he'd already found a lot of information.

Sam, as always, took the lead on the conversation. "So how is it that the Bible doesn't mention these other tablets containing the word of god? I mean, before all of this I always thought the only word of god that existed was the Ten Commandments."

"Obviously those were the most important. Imbued with the power of God himself, or so Indiana Jones would have you believe," Clarke said.

"The tablet I saw didn't melt our faces," Sam said, raising his eyebrows a bit at the reference to _Raiders_.

Clarke paused, and suddenly the comfortable shroud of academic arrogance fell away from him and he almost pounced on Sam with questions. "You actually saw a tablet? What did it say? Could you read it? _How_ could you read it? What did it look like? Where did you find it?"

That's when I first heard the story of the rock that Dean had opened with a sledgehammer and for miles around pregnant ladies gave birth. I heard about how some smart kid got roped into being a prophet. How the tablet had been dropped and the kid fused it together again without even trying. And I actually saw the words he wrote.

Sam freely gave Clarke the notebook the kid had written the word of god in in his childish, girly script. Clarke was beside himself.

He read it avidly and then got back to telling us all about the tablets of god. He said that there were stories that suggested that in the early days—before man had walked the earth and bit the apple and all that, god had been a lot more involved with creation. He had left all these notes around in places of great power to deal with pitfalls that his creation might step into as he created them. Like warning signs beside a volcano. Most of them had been buried under thousands of layers of sand and silt over the years.

"Is there any way we can find some of these tablets? Are there any ancient writings that talk about where they are or how to find them?" Sam asked.

"This is all I could find," Clarke said, holding up a photocopy of an ancient looking book. "I have a translation about halfway finished, but I'll need a few more days to finish it."

"Anything else you can tell us?" Sam asked.

"All I know is they are buried under places of great holiness. I don't know how to recognize these places. Hopefully the rest of the passage will have some clues," he said.

"Thank you," Sam said.

"Do you think it'll pan out?" I asked Sam as we walked back to the impala.

"I know if there was any information about this in any of the sources we have I would have already found it—or Crowley would have."

"What's the story with you and Crowley?" I asked. He brought the demon up, after all.

Sam was silent for a moment, and then smiled grimly. "You ever had an enemy for so long they almost seem like a friend?"

"I try not to let my enemies walk away from me still breathing," I said.

"It must be nice, having the luxury of seeing the world in black and white the way you do," Sam said.

We got in the car and I mulled over what he'd said. I guess I sounded naïve to him—I know now I was. I'd never had to make the choices he'd made. But back then I did see the world in black and white.

"He's a demon," I said flatly.

"That demon, and when I say this, bear in mind that that demon is a total dick and I hate the guy, but that demon saved the lives of basically everyone on earth. Without him the world would have ended. He did it for his own selfish reasons, and we'll probably be fighting him next, god knows, but he has done great things. I've seen him work miracles, just because he can. Not every demon is all out evil every second of the day. Just like every hero I've ever met. In the right light, on the right day, in the right situation, a hero can be a villain every time," he said.

"Does that go for you, too?" I asked.

"I'm not a hero," Sam said.

"All the people you've saved might beg to differ," I said.

"If I was a hero, then what I said would go double for me. Everyone has done things they're not proud of," Sam said.

"What about your brother?" I asked.

"I don't want to talk about my brother," he said.

And that was that.


	3. Chapter 3

A few weeks after the incident with Crowley I turned to Sam and said to him, "You never told me you had a brother."

"I had a lot of things, once," he said.

That was all he needed to say for me to leave it alone. We hunters all have our sad story to tell. No one just leaves a straight life behind for fun. We're born into it, or we're born into it through blood. Either way, we could all fill a set of encyclopedia with the stories we don't want to talk about.

I learned about Dean all the same, now I knew he existed. Parts of Dean's personality became apparent because of Sam's reaction to them. I grew to realize there was a certain look of lost, little boy sadness that fell over Sam's features now and then. When Dean showed up he called this look Sam's bitch-face, because apparently it was the look he gave Dean when they were both younger to get what he wanted. I imagined that was what he looked like when he was thinking about his brother.

Keeping an eye out for this look, I soon felt I knew Dean.

Sam generally kept out of greasy spoons and trucker joints, but when he was forced to go to places like that, he seemed done in by memories of his brother. He'd look around the table at whoever had ordered the greasiest, nastiest burger as though he was tempted to say something about their choice, and then the sadness would wash over him. Dean must have loved his burgers. Same with pie. The pie thing was weird, though, because sometimes Sam would order a piece and not finish it—almost like he was offering a sacrifice to someone, or setting a place for the newly departed.

Dean must have had a cheesy sense of humour, too, because Sam avoided the General like the plague, and no one could account for it. Sam didn't seem like he had much of a sense of humour, so we'd always just thought he was too serious to care much for a joker, but now I suspected Dean had made corny jokes the same way the General did.

He sometimes got almost choked up around little kids and parents—and especially if there were two little kids and a single parent. Sam wasn't great with kids, but he always seemed to remember Dean when he saw them. Maybe Dean had been old enough to help raise him, or maybe Dean had had children of his own. Maybe Dean was just the sort of guy who connects with kids right off—not that I could imagine a hunter like that—but I suspected he might be a soft touch that way.

Most of all Dean seemed like he was good man who always knew the right thing to do. Whenever there was a moral dilemma—some question of ethics—Sam floundered, looking around at the faces of his travelling companions as though he wasn't qualified to make a choice like that. Had Dean been the one telling him what was right and what was wrong his whole life?

What had Sam done that had been so wrong he no longer trusted himself to make those choices?

What had Dean done that had been so right Sam thought Dean should do the thinking for both of them?

I've never found out the answers to those questions. Maybe I'm wrong about some things. I know I was right about the sense of humour and the pie.

We went back and got more information from Clarke a few days later. He was able to tell us that there were magnetic fluctuations around sites that had a tablet nearby. I didn't see how this would help us. "So what do we do, do a grid search of the entire world while looking at a compass?" I asked.

"You can probably leave anything around sea-level off your search. Most of the places were tablets have been found have been at least three thousand feet above sea level," he said.

"Have they been found higher than that?" Sam asked.

"No, it seems to be about the right elevation for them," Clarke said.

"I'm not going to start climbing mountains for this shit," I mumbled.

"Hopefully we won't have to," Sam said. "Is there anything else? Any other clue?"

"Well, it says that men will feel a natural aversion to building anything on the sites of the burial grounds. So if there is a city that's three thousand feet above sea level, you can rule it out, because people built something there," Clarke said.

"Any idea how deep these things are buried?" Sam asked.

"Maybe you should talk to a geologist—find out how deep the layers of vegetation and silt and all that would have built up over all those thousands of years would be," Clarke said.

While we were walking back to the impala, I had to state the obvious. "How are we going to dig down and find these tablets? We don't have access to a huge workforce or the equipment we would need to dig like Dick Roman did."

"Maybe something got lost in the translation," he said. "I'm going to get a second opinion."

I looked away from Sam so he couldn't see me rolling my eyes. "How are these things any safer with you than they would be in the ground? I mean, let's face it, you're a good hunter, but you're not Fort Knox, and Crowley has every demon in hell on his side."

"She's a bit smarter than you and your brother—or maybe not. After all, because of her I have everything I need to find the stones. You can still help, if you want," Crowley said.

Sam looked shocked that Crowley had appeared out of nowhere, right in the middle of a university parking lot, but not as shocked as I was. Could a demon just hang out invisible with you for as long as he wanted? It seemed so…creepy.

"Crowley, why do you even want these things?" Sam asked, his voice strangely holding more exasperation than alarm.

"I thought you were the smart one, Moose. Knowledge is power. I'd have to be a fool not to want them," Crowley said.

"Why would you need our help?" I asked. "Don't you have thousands of demons to help you do whatever you need to do?"

"Getting demons topside is never easy. Red tape, you know. If I could put every demon in hell in a human whenever I wanted—but sadly, there is a process that has to be followed. And then when they get here, half of them haven't been topside since the middle ages. Orientation is a bitch. It'd be a lot easier if I had your neat little army to do the heavy lifting," Crowley said.

"We're hardly an army," I murmured.

"Money, of course, is no object. I'll find the sites, and you hire the local excavators or what have you to clear the site," Crowley said.

"I told you, I'm not giving you the tablets," Sam argued.

Crowley all of a sudden seemed to burn cold. "I don't need you Sam, not really. If you don't want to help, you'll miss out on the chance to get your brother back, and you'll never get to the tablets first. You know my resources better than anyone. If you don't want to help, just say the word."

Sam glared, and he must have been considering how he could steal the tablets out from under Crowley better if they were partners than if he were out on his own. I know that's what I was thinking. "Fine. But first we make a deal. If we get a word of God, and give it to you, you find Dean and bring him back."

"The first one? Have you forgotten who I am? I'm the king of the Crossroads, and I don't make bad deals. Try again," he said.

"How many are there?" Sam asked with some dismay.

"There are five. The Leviathan, the Gods, the Monsters, the Humans and the Demons. I did hear rumours about an angel tablet—but I haven't been able to find out if it's just a myth or not," Crowley said.

"How is it that you found this entire thing out and still weren't able to find out about the magnetic thing?" I asked.

"That little nugget was only shared with one Hebrew prophet, and he never made the trip downstairs. Only a few copies of his prophecies exist, and I never found one. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get started. I'll call you with a location, Sam."

After he left Sam and I made our way to the impala and got in.

"So the King of Hell has your phone number?" I asked absently.

"Unfortunately," he muttered.


End file.
